Born 1962, he studied at the "Ecole Nationale Superior des Beaux Arts of Paris". During this period, he produced several monumental works and obtained numerous prizes. Following his graduation, yearning to travel, he decides with the aid of an American scholarship to go to live in the United States. He attends post graduate studies at Hunter College (New York).

It is in this context that his work feeds on and personalizes itself. He turns towards the domain of multi-media installations, of social and scenographic nature. Sensitive to the diversity of the situations and preoccupied with the different groups he meets, he heads towards the achievement of works in their own environment.ONE PERSON EXHIBITIONS

The word apostil comes from the Latin “post illa”, “after those things”and is generally written in the left margin, whether it is a legaldocument or the note that we added today at the bottom of a page.

The purpose of this column is to publish an original text on abi-monthly basis.pourinfos.org wishes to share periodically contemporary thoughts in anon-synchronized time/news (headlines) relationship with no furtherintention to become a magazine or a review.The articles that you will read in this column will not only debatematters about visual arts, but also about topics related to society,politics, techniques, etc…

Ancient orators from the Antiquity used to associate variousarchitectural elements belonging to a building or a city with thesalient points of their discourse. When addressing an audience, theymentally traveled through their imaginary journey to recall the manystages of their argumentation: this staircase reminding them of a veryexplicit metaphor, that corbelled construction reminding them of anopponent’s critique, and so on… The very Western concept of “mentalspace” developed from “the Art of memory” gained many mystical andmagical connotations all along the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,finally to reach many centuries later, the concept of cyberspace, theInternet [2].

The Net, just like the old memory palaces, is an abstract space wheresemantic elements, ideas, concepts and texts can be found. However,unlike ancient structures, semantic objects are not arbitrarilydistributed according to an urban or an external architectural diagramthat would be elaborated separately. Here, the discourse itselforganizes the space, creates landscapes and cathedrals, and designscurves for its streets. There is more to it: the memory palace was adesert space kept for the lonely orator’s meditation. This very space isfilled with crowds that are moving in it, following paths that have beenimposed on them by the language itself. Therefore, Net’s new geographyis simultaneously describing a social landscape and a semantic universe.

The Web is the mirror of the Net.

The Web gets most attention from new comers in this mental space.However, the Web is not really the Net. It is only a visible face.The Web is the Net’s distorting mirror. The Net is dynamic, and isformed by a flux of ideas or individuals; the Web is static, and isconstituted by sites, and more or less permanent pages. The Net is “peerto peer” [3]], bidirectional. Everybody participates and interacts. TheWeb is “client/server”: a few large suppliers spread information tosmall addressees who are, in fact, a passive audience that only getoccasionally connected: most of us.However, the Web already has a complex geography in spite of all thesesimplifications. One does refer to it as the domain of “absolutetransparency”, of “real time”… In fact, a Web page is only accessible tothose having the necessary information to reach it; whether it is ahyperlink to it, obtained through a page pointing to it, or the keywordsgroup enabling it to show in Google - and in the first three-referencepages-. Furthermore, studies indicate that search engines such as Googleonly cover about 69\% of the easy-reach pages of the Web [4].

As a result, for serious cyber surfers, “surfing on the Web” looksrather like a Dungeons and Dragons game. Their real challenge is to getthe “keys” that will enable them to reach the finest and more precisepages. A serious knowledge of the field of studies is required toachieve that level.

The social network.

Already noticeable on the Web, this escalation turns out to be an evenmore exact metaphor when the most discreet aspect of the Net isapproached, the virtual communities where the network’s true reality canbe found. In order to get there, one needs to identify them: the easiestto find are logged in catalogues such as usenet alt.groups* oryahoogroups diffusion lists. One then needs to be accepted by the group.One might be rejected only on the basis of the sole indifference of theother members, in case of a lack of serious moderators. The groupacceptance depends both on the level of knowledge of the subject matterand often on the group’s specific etiquette.

At last, there are some discussion lists that are only accessiblethrough other communities acting as breeding grounds. Those areexclusively available through invitations. Again, the digital landscapeshows us bumps and holes, flat open countries for all and high tops forthe most determined.

La blogosphere.

The “blogosphere” is a Web subset, which gathers all the “blogs” [5] andhas got an even more Escherian type of geography. It actually is ahybrid between an ensemble of Web sites and a discussion group similarto usenet or mailing lists. A primary post sent on a blog will end upreproduced on many pages and moreover, commented in many various places,via RSS Feed [6] and diverse connections linking bloggers. It is hardfor readers to follow feedback from material without knowing preciselywhat “community” is involved in a precise section of the blogosphere,the group of actors who would be interested in the same topic. Thereare, of course, some useful tools such as search engines, which can logthe occurence of a specific “post”. Blogpulse [7] is a service thatintends to trace the evolution of a discussion through various sites.Just as traditional search engines, these systems work better for whosewho know what to look for and how to look for it.

The smallest world.

In fact, the notion of “small worlds”, part of the Graph Theory [8]itself produces the architecture relevant to the digital universe,blueprint for the “memory palace”.This theory discloses the Net infrastructure as a whole, since it worksentirely, including the Web, according to its principles.This mathematical theory, elaborated by Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz[9],explores the existence of a particular category of networks, called“small worlds”. Closest nodes are strongly connected together andproduce “sets” or “clusters”, relatively isolated from each others,except that one or two connections come out from every cluster [10],liking it to external nodes.As surprising as it may seem, the existence of a very small number oflong distance relationships is enough to easily cross the globalnetwork. The famous “six degrees” law states that there are more or lesssix degrees distance between two inhabitants on our planet, whoever theyare. In other words, one knows somebody who knows somebody, etc… whogoes around with a randomly targeted person. It is true in the realworld, but even more so in cyberspace where these six degrees can becrossed in a snap. Thus, there would be an average of four degreesdistance between two mail servers located anywhere in the world. Inother words, an Email wouldn’t need more than four stages to go from onepoint to another. In order to go via hyperlinks from one Web page to anyother page, the maximum gap, the Web diameter, as they call it, would bearound 19. This is a lot, but relatively not, when thinking about thenumber of existing pages.The global blogosphere is more recent and is not yet entirely connected.One cannot go for sure from one blog to another following links thatjoin them together. Most of them are simply disconnected from theirneighbors. But some parts of the blogosphere, such as “livejournal”, ablogger community that gathers together almost 7 millions blogs, wouldshow around 6 degrees distance between its members, 10 degrees at most [11].

New wealth, new peaks.

According to Mark Buchanan, Nexus’ author [12], there would be two typesof “small worlds networks”. The first ones, described by Duncan Watts,are made of clusters with randomly added long-distance links. AsBuchanan remarks, the characteristics of these very egalitarian smallworlds are pure mathematic constructions: they do not have a history ora development; this is not the case for the Web and the Net. These areproducts of the real world and they have a somehow different structure:main connections are provided by “big connectors”, that holdsimultaneously a much larger number of connections than the latter two.It is true for Web pages and Internet servers in general. With a smallworlds logic, bigger nodes get new connections faster. “The rich getricher”, says Buchanan.Although, as we already know, one cannot yet attribute small worldsnetwork characters to blogospheres, the presence of more important nodescan also be noticed, essentially those involved in “news screening”, andonly incorporate other blogs or page contents.

A hierarchical society?

It is easy to understand that a society built on more and morespecialized discussion lists answers to the same criteria. The mostreputable ones, with best people and best networks, do have best chancesto develop new relationships and develop their address books. Again,riches become richer. For Alexander Bard, a Swedish pop star who becamea philosopher, and his co-author Ian Soderqvsit [13], the complexity ofthe Net ends up as a pyramidal organization topped with netocrates: agroup of individuals collecting good addresses and good friends…Today,everyone’s capacity to store contacts is materialized by the emergenceof new Web services called “social networks” such as Orkut or LinkedIn.Because of these networks, everyone has the chance to visualize theextent of their connections and the extent of their correspondent’sconnections, to check how many “degrees of distance” are necessary toreach a potential employer or a famous artist…Here again, one should be careful not to mistake the map and theterritory. One should only think of Orkut, LonkedIn, or the likes as anapproximation, a mirror of the “on-line” social network, just as the Webis only reflection of the real Net. One will still have navigate the Netcontinent without a proper cartography for a long time.

[3] Peer to peer :The word “poste a poste” is the French translation (initially adopted inCanada) for the English “peer-to-peer”, often in short, P2P. It is alsopossible to translate the term by “pair a pair” or “egal a egal”. Inthis article, the term P2P will be used systematically.P2P designates a network model whose elements (nodes) do not only have aclient-server role, but also function both ways. They are at the sametime clients and servers for other nodes belonging to these networks,unlike the usual client-server structures.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer\_to\_peer

[5] Blog :A blog is a Web site where one individual or a group expresse themselvesfreely on a rather regular basis. In short, a blog is a personal Webcreated by incorporating periodic news or “billets”, usually presentedin reverse chronological order (more recent entries at the top of thepage). Readers are invited to comment, and most of the time, blogs areenriched with external links.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

[6] Rss :The abbreviation RSS Feed is used for Really Simple Syndication or RichSite Summary, and is a file format for Web syndication. It is a dynamicXML file that your RSS (ex: Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird) candisplay and it can be updated regularly. This system is widely used bythe Web community to share latest entries from various information sites(head news, sciences, computing, etc…) or blogs. This allows the readersto consult the latest entries without going to the site, and to formatthem to their taste. There are seven different RSS formats calling forthe necessary development of a norm. Note that Syndicate is linked withjournalism and article sales to various newspapers. In fact, standardallows the spread of all kinds of information, headlines, periodicupdates of lists and events. Really Simple Syndication is, in fact, asimpler journalistic diffusion.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss

Remi Sussan’ biography:Born in 1960, Remi Sussan is a journalist specialized in newtechnologies. Above all, he is interested in the way people are usingthem, and in the parallel and alternative movements resulting from themor initiating them. He not only wrote various papers about the mostfuturistic angles of computer science (artificial intelligence, virtualreality) for the specialized press (.Net Pro, Login), scientificpopularization or technical articles (Technikart, Web magazine), but healso produced work on the underground trends (Introduction aux religionsdu futur, La Spirale). He recently published “Les Utopies posthumaines”.